Super Bowl Tickets Available; Bring Cash, Lots, to the Hotel

NEW ORLEANS — Steve Sigel has spent Super Bowl week running around this city with backpacks stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash. After leaving their base of operations — a recently rented house in a residential neighborhood — he and an associate dart in and out of public places like coffee shops and hotel lobbies, locations they have deemed safe for the frequent, high-money transactions they deal with.

“You’ve got to have the cash,” Mr. Sigel said. “Nobody’s going to take a check from you, because they don’t know you. So you’ve got to be prepared and ready.”

This may sound illicit, but what these two middle-aged men with shaved heads are doing is, in fact, legal. Mr. Sigel is a licensed ticket broker, and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Super Bowl tickets will pass through his hands this week. For Mr. Sigel, just as for the National Football League, this is the pinnacle of the year.

“The Super Bowl is our single biggest event,” said Mr. Sigel, who agreed to provide a rare look inside the lucrative world of ticket resale operations.

Mr. Sigel and other ticket brokers like him will spend the week leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl trying to buy as many tickets to the game as they can and then sell them at a profit. Mr. Sigel buys tickets with cash in hand-to-hand transactions, then posts them for sale on his company’s Web site, which is technically based in Illinois, where the reselling of tickets is legal. When buyers contact him through the Web site, they can go to a makeshift ticket pickup center — essentially a table manned by Mr. Sigel’s sister this week at a downtown hotel — to exchange the money for the tickets.

How much of a profit is made on each sale varies, although Mr. Sigel said selling a ticket that was bought for $1,200 for $1,800 was considered a successful transaction, and that is the normal markup for a ticket. The face value of Super Bowl tickets ranges from $850 to $1,250.

The tickets can come from N.F.L. players or coaches, who all get the opportunity to purchase two tickets from the league to each Super Bowl, or from people who work for companies that are corporate sponsors. The league prohibits its employees, and players and coaches, from selling their tickets for a profit, and has disciplined those it has caught doing so in the past, but the practice remains relatively common and lightly policed. When asked about ticket brokering, the N.F.L. pointed out its policy prohibiting the resale of tickets.

“We’re doing what anyone else does in any business,” Mr. Sigel said. “We’re in the service industry. I provide a service. I give people access to tickets. And a lot of times, I sell tickets for less than I paid for them.”

Mr. Sigel, 42, runs a small St. Louis-based company called The Ticket Guys, a Web site where tickets to sporting events and concerts can be purchased. The site was established in 1999, when ticket brokering was not yet legal in Missouri. So Mr. Sigel registered his firm in East St. Louis, Ill. — across the Mississippi River from St. Louis — under the Illinois Ticket Sale and Resale Act. Registering this way separates brokers like Mr. Sigel from the scalpers outside almost every major sporting event.

Mr. Sigel has little to fear from the local police. “We’re looking mainly for people trying to sell counterfeit tickets,” said Sgt. Mike Sposito of the New Orleans Police Department, adding, “We want to make sure we have a safe, secure event.” The police, he said, “don’t want people to get taken advantage of.”

Photo

Steve Karadja, left, and Steve Sigel working in the house they have rented in New Orleans.Credit
Lee Celano for The New York Times

Gabe Feldman, the director of Tulane Law School Sports Law Program, said that online ticket exchanges can help prevent fraud and consumer deception. “These sites have provided safe, reliable and efficient ways for buyers and sellers to find each other and to allow market forces to dictate the resale price,” Mr. Feldman said in an e-mail. “It’s virtually impossible to provide that type of protection for face-to-face ticket sales on the street.”

The Super Bowl can represent about 10 percent of the company’s annual profit, so each year Mr. Sigel and a handful of his co-workers rent a house in the host city a few weeks before the game.

When visited recently at their house in downtown New Orleans, Mr. Sigel was sitting on a sofa in shorts and a T-shirt, leaning over a glass coffee table covered by two laptop computers, a couple of cellphones, a landline phone, empty plastic drink bottles, wireless speakers and a tablet computer. Color-coded seating charts of the Superdome were scattered around him. The news coverage from St. Louis of Stan Musial’s death was being streamed onto a flat-screen TV.

It was from here, weeks before the game, that Mr. Sigel and his co-workers did their reconnaissance work. Because Super Bowl tickets cannot be transferred electronically and need to be physically delivered from one person to another, Mr. Sigel and his associates need to learn their way around town. They want to map out where people who may potentially sell their tickets will be staying. They want to know where all the local FedEx locations are. They want to be able to get where they need to go as quickly as they can. They want to know the shortcuts the locals take. They also want to meet a few new ticket sources in the local community — the team hosting the Super Bowl gets a small allotment of tickets to distribute.

“We’ve got to get our bank accounts set up, our safe deposit boxes set up, that kind of stuff,” Mr. Sigel said, noting that he also needed to order large sums of money because many banks did not carry enough cash in large bills for him to conduct his business at the speed he needed to.

Though neither Mr. Sigel nor one of his associates, Steve Karadja, 53, would disclose exactly how much cash they routinely carried with them in their backpacks, they indicated it was upward of $10,000.

“That’s pocket change,” Mr. Karadja said with a chuckle.

Mr. Sigel has been dealing in Super Bowl tickets for more than a decade, and during a good week he sells 300 to 400 tickets. Although he is not breaking any laws selling tickets online at a price above face value, the people who sell to him are breaking the law in many states, including Louisiana, Mr. Feldman said.

“Louisiana state law prohibits any scalping of tickets above face value of the ticket unless the tickets are sold online with permission of the event organizer and location,” Mr. Feldman said. “A New Orleans city ordinance also prevents any Super Bowl tickets from being sold within 750 feet of the Superdome.”

By Super Bowl Sunday, most of the hard work is done for Mr. Sigel and Mr. Karadja. All that remains is getting the tickets to the buyers who have yet to pick them up. Once that is done, the brokers are usually so exhausted that they go back to where they are staying and fall asleep before the game even ends. Unless, of course, there is cause to celebrate.

“Sometimes we’ll go out for a steak,” Mr. Karadja said with a smile. “If it was a particularly good week.”

On Wednesday night, Mr. Sigel and Mr. Karadja huddled back at their rented house with Mr. Sigel’s sister, Renee Hurst, 46, who had just flown into town. She indicated that she spoke to some N.F.L. players who were on her flight into New Orleans.

“They’re all coming to pick up their tickets, sell them, and then fly back home,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 31, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Super Bowl Tickets Available; Bring Cash, Lots, to the Hotel. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe